Review: de Young Museum’s ‘Jewel City’ looks to past and future

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Dynamism of a Soccer Player, 1913, oil on canvas, by Umberto Boccioni(1882 1916), is featured in Jewel City at San Francisco s de YoungMuseum. (Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco)Bruce ManuelFine Arts Museums of San FranciscoFine Arts Museums of San FranciscoYesYes

Moonlight I, 1896, color woodcut on thin Japanese paper, by Edvard Munch(1863 1944) is featured in Jewel City at San Francisco s de Young Museum.(Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco)Bruce ManuelFine Arts Museums of San FranciscoFine Arts Museums of San FranciscoYesYes

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The Sketchers, 1913 oil on canvas by John Singer Sargent (1856 1925) isfeatured in Jewel City at San Francisco s de Young Museum. (Fine ArtsMuseums of San Francisco)Bruce ManuelFine Arts Museums of San FranciscoFine Arts Museums of San FranciscoYesYes

Palace of Fine Arts and the Lagoon, oil on canvas, ca. 1915, by EdwinDeakin (1838 1923), is featured in Jewel City at San Francisco s de YoungMuseum. (Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco)Bruce ManuelFine Arts Museums of San FranciscoFine Arts Museums of San FranciscoYesYes

The Pool (The Court of the Four Seasons), an oil on canvas, ca. 1915, byE. Charlton Fortune (1885 1969), is featured in Jewel City at SanFrancisco s de Young Museum. (Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco)Bruce ManuelFine Arts Museums of San FranciscoFine Arts Museums of San FranciscoYesYes

The centennial of San Francisco’s Panama-Pacific International Exposition, which transformed the city’s northern waterfront with grand boulevards and ancient-looking palaces, shifts from civic celebration to the international art world in the exhibit “Jewel City.”

The de Young Museum in Golden Gate Park has assembled nearly 200 paintings, sculptures, prints and photographs that were actually on display a century ago in the Palace of Fine Arts. That’s the fair’s only structure still standing — grandly restored — in its original location.

In 1915, more than 11,000 works of art were on view in the cavernous, semicircular Palace of Fine Arts and other major venues. Thousands more could be found in state and national exposition halls, such as the French pavilion, which inspired San Francisco’s Legion of Honor museum in Lincoln Park.

“Jewel City,” on view through Jan. 10, does more than reassemble some of the original art. It also suggests with a wall-size sepia photograph — almost three-dimensional — what it would have been like to visit the galleries 100 years ago. An adjacent wall is hung with a dense array of paintings in the fair’s traditional “salon” style.

James Ganz, the exhibit’s lead curator, and his staff have added photographs and paintings of the fairgrounds that reveal the surprising color of the palaces, rows of columns and floral landscaping. Among them are Anne Bremer’s “An Old Fashioned Garden” and E. Charlton Fortune’s “Court of Flowers.”

On its own terms, in the present day, “Jewel City” is a vast exhibit of American and international works by both famous and still-unfamiliar artists. They range from Frederic Remington’s 1895 bronze “The Bronco Buster” to Italian Futurist Giacomo Balla’s 1913 “Disintegration x Speed, Dynamic Dispersions of an Automobile.”

The exposition marked the first showing of Italian Futurist art in America. “Weird Pictures … reveal Artistic Brainstorms” read the headline for one San Francisco review. For many visitors to the de Young exhibit, modern art from a century ago will still look modern. In this expansive series of galleries, surprises can be found around every corner.

The big names and familiar styles are here, too — especially Impressionism, as comfortable and popular then as it is now. Here is Claude Monet’s 1892 “Rouen Cathedral Façade,” one of a series studying the changing light of day. John Singer Sargent is represented by “The Sketchers” (1913), a group of friends painting outdoors, and the much less familiar “Stable at Cuenca” (1903), with its almost steaming cluster of livestock.

Among the other American masters are Thomas Eakins, with the charming and intriguing “The Concert Singer” (1890-1892); Winslow Homer, with the angular, hypnotic and very modern-looking “The Artist’s Studio in an Afternoon Fog” (1894); and John Sloan, depicting a working woman’s evening out in “Renganeschi’s Saturday Night” (1912).

“Jewel City” has the good sense to revive some first-rate but lesser-known American artists. A century later, there is fresh appeal to Cecilia Beaux’s “Man with the Cat” (1898), an expressive seated portrait; Julian Alden Weir’s “The Bridge: Nocturne” (1910), recalling Whistler; and Clark Hobart’s “The Blue Bay: Monterey” (ca. 1915), which might presage Richard Diebenkorn.

The exposition, in what is now San Francisco’s mostly bland Marina district, certainly offered an escape to an enchanted city in 1915, with its Tower of Jewels as a landmark. But the world and international events did not stand still. In the summer of 1914, Austria-Hungary had declared war on Serbia, and World War I began.

The exposition organizers feared that, among the other consequences, art from central Europe would never make it to San Francisco. But in a remarkable series of events, Norwegian-born art critic J. Nilsen Laurvik and his Hungarian-born wife, Elma Palos, traveled to Europe “under the darkening clouds of war,” as the exhibit catalog notes. The result was a trove of international artwork — much of it absolutely modern — for the exposition.

We can see the effect even a century later in the Austrian Expressionism, Hungarian Modernism and Italian Futurism. Among the works that still pack a punch are Edvard Munch’s color woodcut “Moonlight I” (1896), Oskar Kokoschka’s sinewy “Portrait of Egon Wellesz” (1911) and Gino Severini’s “Spherical Expansion of Light, Centripetal” (1913-1914).

The Palace of Fine Arts’ landmark colonnade, dome and lagoon, restored several times in the past century, were meant to suggest a faded Babylon. But some of the art originally displayed in its vast exhibit hall was very much of its time — breaking into the 20th century, and looking forward to the future.

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